When New Directions reprinted Rao’s novel Kanthapura in 1967, the assumption was that the work would interest an American readership. By looking at the operation of the foreign donor community in Egypt, local comprador NGOs and missionizing Western development practitioners a material infrastructure is revealed that is invested in repressing other cases of ‘freedom’ such that El Mahdy’s appear as indigenous. This paper traces the infrastructure that is necessary for such an interpellation and the repression of other cases of ‘freedom’ such that this instance become possible. Yet El Mahdy’s interprelation of the ‘political’ and ‘freedom’ is not germane nor is it as seamless as the West makes it seem, contrary to Sweden’s asylum standards which do not include Syrians or Iraqi fleeing the region. El Mahdy’s body becomes an articulation of how this freedom is imbricated with the West’s own contradictions when it comes to balancing rhetoric of openness and the question of Arab refugees. In that instance a racialized other that lacks ‘freedom’ and ‘political’ awareness is performed. In this liberation the West is rendered as the guardian of ‘freedom’. Both instances are part of the continued fascination of Western feminism’s desire to liberate individuals of a lower racial hierarchy as an act that defines both the ‘political’ and as a corollary ‘freedom’. This latest expose was part of El Mahdy’s work with Femen, the Ukranian based feminist group. In the comfort of Sweden in 2014, Alia El Mahdy posted pictures of her nude body once again, bleeding on the flag of the Islamic State. This bellow for ‘freedom’, and the subsequent outcry against it, allowed her to put forward an application for ‘political’ asylum in Sweden which was swiftly granted. In 2011, in the wake of Egypt’s uprising, an Egyptian self-styled feminist by the name of Alia El Mahdy decided to post pictures of herself nude on her Facebook page in an act of ‘freedom’. Their procedure-part game, part indictment-forces us interlocutors to return through their methods of negation and reengaging the non-human world, to think the person-animal, animal-person, and thus rethink the human in the unrevealed political world. The self-conscious poesis in each is part of an attempt to shift perspective internally, addressing life and the negative of death through already internalizing the animal, in a proliferating dialectic. The unusual negation of the human but retention in anthropomorphism, hybridity, metaphor, or parable, demonstrates the work of thought, askew from where we expected it to be. Each has moments where they swing the focus, unexpectedly, to the animal. Each includes the framework and aspects of supernatural revelation, then subverts through further plot turns (Kafka) or philosophical discussion (Plato) the presumed commandment predicated on access to the divine. Contrasting these two thinkers’ reworkings of culturally accepted theological imperatives from different eras and genres provides insight into their shared dialectical method. He brings us to the outwards signs of it, to the need for it, to the aesthetics of it ("In the Penal Colony," “Before the Law,” and “Jackals and Arabs”) but also to the fact the modern world cannot accept it. Kafka, analogously, approaches revelation in several stories and withdraws it quite clearly. Plato's dialogues repeatedly invoke, then scrutinize presumably divine imperatives for action: supernatural lawgivers are dismissed in the Laws and the afterlife is emphatically a myth or story in three different tellings in the Republic, Phaedo, and Gorgias the Oracle at Delphi and Socrates’ sign in the Apology both seem to provide a privileged connection to the divine, yet are undercut as simple imperatives by tendentious philosophical interpretation, just as “piety” is interrogated in the Euthyphro. Both Plato’s dialogues, as ancient literary philosophy, and Kafka’s stories, as modern philosophical literature, incorporate divine revelation as part of a dialectical dissection of values.
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